In many industrial, business and medical environments, workers are required to repetitively lift, position and orient tools and objects of significant weight, and deploy them anywhere within the reach of their arms, from low to overhead to extending out in front. The resulting stresses, particularly from overhead usages, or near-full extension of the arm, are a common cause of work-related shoulder and forearm injuries.
Ergonomic equipment supports are known in the art, including ‘tool balancers’ that suspend tools on wires from retractable reels, and articulated support arms that work in conjunction with two or three-axis gimbal attachments to provide angular freedom between the arm and the supported equipment. These support systems typically require the tool to be supported at its center of gravity. This can be a challenge because the center-of-gravity of a given tool is often located within a non-cylindrical section of the tool body, which may inhibit the installation of a gimbal bearing assembly of appropriate size. Also, it may be desirable for the various gimbal axes of rotation not to converge at the center-of-balance of a given tool, if the use of such tool would be facilitated by non-neutral balance, for example, by the tool hanging ‘at rest’ at a particular angle that helps accomplish the task.
Further, the existence of large-diameter gimbal rings may obstruct or inhibit the use of certain tools by blocking the operator's hands or sight-lines. In fact some tools have such limited and particular mounting opportunities (such as appropriate handles, bosses, brackets, etc.) that no concentric gimbal rings can usefully be attached.
It would therefore, be advantageous to provide an apparatus to selectively bias the ‘resting’ angle of a gimbaled tool to suit the user's preference, and further to include adjustable motion inhibiting devices such as friction components rotation stops, and pinch-point protection.
Accordingly, there is a need for a versatile, ergonomic, and angularly agile gimballed tool support system, which can accommodate tools of various sizes, shapes, configurations and internal distributions of mass, as well as varying operator access constraints, and which can preferably be simply, rapidly and accurately set up at the workplace.